You're Never Fully Dressed Without A Smile
by NotoriousReign
Summary: Steve knows he's different, he knows he's not normal. And he knows how to fix that. (WARNING rated M for self-harm.)


**Author's Note:** I read this prompt about Steve in the Avengers kinkmeme on livejournal about how he tests his limits by hurting himself and it's just stuck with me for awhile, so I finally wrote it. Hope you like the way I've written him and also fair warning, there _is_ a considerable amount of self-harm and cutting in this.

**Disclaimer:** I do not own anything relating to the Avengers or Marvel or the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I also do not own the quote I use and the poetry. Credits are in the bottom author's note because I didn't want them _in_ the fic you know? But I definitely do not own them or take credit for them.

* * *

_The sun's consuming rays, much nearer now,  
__soften the fragrant wax that bound his wings  
__until it melts._

* * *

SHIELD sent all of Steve's possessions to Tony's tower in New York – the one he had rebuilt for the avengers to accommodate the new team. They finally found a box of some of the stuff he grew up with before he had woken up in the 21st century and they sent it to the tower, so Tony took the opportunity to ask him why he hadn't moved in yet.

They had agreed on meeting in a giant conference room Tony had fixed up on the first floor at least once a week after he had finished the final remodeling. They would relate different events each of them encountered: bad guys essentially, but half the time the conferences delved into different ways they could bond and somehow Tony had planned a movie night. The Wizard of Oz. The tower received Steve's items from SHIELD and when he had arrived tentatively that movie night thinking the movie of choice was a joke, Tony handed his stuff right over.

"You should really move in. Clint did it and I could at least get why _he_ wouldn't want to."

Natasha, surprisingly, was the one who shot Tony an annoyed look as she walked by with a martini she had made herself (or asked Jarvis to make, Steve wouldn't know). She had her curly red hair pulled back in a bun and it was the first time he had seen her in sweatpants. Black, _that_ was no surprise.

Clint _had_ been the recent one to move in and he still kept to himself most of the time, but it still surprised most of them that he had done it and Steve hadn't. Steve stood at the bar near Tony's giant home theatre in a plain grey long-sleeved shirt and blue jeans because he tried not to wear too many blue, red, and white combinations during casual meetings, but his old clothes and life were all he could think of. He didn't know how to answer Tony as he stared down at the cardboard box that thrust him back in time. He was surrounded by technologies still being perfected, especially in a tower designed by a Stark, but when he looked into this box he felt like it was 1940 again.

Old photographs: a few of his mother, one of him and Bucky together pre-serum, one of them overseas post-serum, one of Peggy; old clothes and medicines he doesn't need anymore; an old tin cup he used to use with scratches still down the middle; old drawings of his; an empty sketchbook, and a poetry book by old writers that had taken up his time when he was younger. That was it, that was all of it.

It wasn't much, but it was all there. Everything even had that musky smell he had been used to when he lived with his mother and for a good minute there Steve forgot where he was standing.

Tony waited and actually started to look worried. He handed Steve a beer and patted him on the back. Maybe showing him this stuff and then asking him to move in was too much for the "old guy", at least for now.

* * *

And it was, although Steve would never admit it. That night he had been quieter than Clint or Bruce and he had no doubt everyone noticed since it was one of his favourite movies they were watching, but it was also because that was night it started. That was also the night he started testing his limits.

It was the medication really that had given him the idea. Old outdated medication that had barely kept him alive before he took the serum that would probably be outlawed now. Steve wondered… was he even human anymore?

Bruce, who turned into the Hulk, still needed to recuperate from injuries during fights. Tony had his suits, but he was still human underneath them as well. At least Thor had a better excuse than Steve.

It was like Tony had said. He was a laboratory experiment.

So he started with the expired pills. Took two of them and nothing happened.

Took four more and still nothing.

He gulped down the whole bottle in his little kitchen in Brooklyn.

Nothing, he was fine.

He didn't even pass out. He was fine.

* * *

After some really messed up guy got his hands on old Chitauri tech and went on a rampage across Los Angeles, the avengers were there in an instant. How the guy managed to travel that far west without alerting people like SHIELD they didn't bother asking.

Well Tony couldn't help quipping in the heat of the fight with a "typical" and Steve found himself smirking even when he took the punch to the gut, but Bruce's involvement eventually helped end the fight in their favour.

They all wanted to stick around to help clean up the mess that was made and Steve really _noticed_ everything for the first time that day. It felt like his eyes had been opened. Tony had to fix his armour and had ended up with a broken rib and wrist. Natasha and Clint were covered in scratches and bruises, Bruce and Thor even looked winded.

But Steve was unscathed. He healed from every injury instantly. He ended up sticking around longer while the rest of them recuperated and arrived at the tower late into the night.

Tony greeted him with an exuberant smile, handing him a champagne glass but all Steve could see was Tony's wrist in a sling and stitches on his forehead. All he could see was his new team covered in bandages, so many bandages.

"You doing okay man?" Clint asked from his spot at the long cushioned red couch in the conference room. He looked exhausted and flushed, eagerly going for seconds with the alcohol. "You barely even got a scratch on you."

There was a hint of jealousy in his eyes, still mentally healing from everything Loki had done to him. So Steve drank two bottles of wine that night at the tower. Two bottles of Greek wine and six beer bottles from Canada.

He finally started to feel a buzz.

This was perfect. He was finally testing his limits, he was finally _getting_ limits, like everyone else.

"I'm fine, I'm fine." He waved them off, after Tony offered to let him stay the night there. ("And every night" he not so conspicuously added.) He slept off the buzz in his small empty apartment and like he knew he would, woke up just fine.

The next morning he bought his own heavy alcoholic drinks: vodka, scotch, rum, wine—all mixed together, all finally getting him blackout drunk for the first time that night in his life.

It was fantastic. He was human. He _did_ have limits again.

* * *

Steve remembered being rushed to the hospital a few weeks after his father died and then after he was first denied the chance to join the War overseas. He promised his mother he would never do it again.

But… this wasn't the 1940s anymore. He wasn't skinny and helpless anymore. He barely came out of fights and battles – with aliens! – without so much as a scratch on him. He couldn't even get properly drunk without mixing bottles and bottles of the strongest alcohol together.

So the knives were next. First the small butter knives, but those barely left a dent on the back of his hand. His mother had nothing to worry about. He was fine, not even any limits. That was always the problem. He went to different stores, including pawn shops and bought combat knives, daggers, a butcher's knife and throwing knives.

Bruce ran into him at the last hardware shop and Steve felt panic settle in. But why? He wasn't doing anything wrong. He quickly told Bruce that the bag he was carrying contained old war heirlooms and then hurried to his apartment and felt his heart jump into his throat. He was fine. He just wanted to prove that he could be as normal as the rest of them and he couldn't do that if he always walked out of a fight like he hadn't even been touched, right?

One of the pictures of his mother, dead for years now, reminded him of the old vulnerability he used to have and he barely managed to keep his hand sliced open for more than a minute with the throwing knife, but it was definitely progress. The sharp pain that lasted for even longer afterwards and lingered there stunned him for a bit, but then he tried the rest.

The combat knives left a few long scratches on his right arm for two minutes. Just as long on his leg. The daggers slicing through his skin more often than the combat knives, on his left arm and then leg, on the bigger muscles, lasted five whole minutes. Five minutes! This would _really_ surprise people if they knew he was slowly getting more and more vulnerable, especially his team.

This would make him normal.

The butcher's knife was a different story.

* * *

"What's that?" Natasha had a tendency to sound very soft and curious but her voice was always deeper than Steve was used to and he noticed her dark blue eyes staring at the white handkerchief wrapped around his hand.

"Just a cut."

There were tiny red marks starting to seep through.

"Are you okay?"

It had taken a full day to heal, but it still healed. Progress.

"I'm fine."

* * *

Day one: take a bottle of pills you haven't used before.

Day two: heap more and more alcohol into your system.

Day three: test the knives again.

Day four: … test how long you can breathe underwater?

Once he heard about the creatures that lived in the sea that could harm citizens and a few of them _tried_ to, another thought quickly jumped into Steve's mind. How long could he survive if he was surrounded by water the way he took air for granted?

Could he even drown? Like a normal human being? Like he almost did as a kid when the lifeguard had looked away at the community pool for only a second? He hated that he knew the answer.

He had to make himself drown.

It was a weekly routine and his healing prevented anybody from finding out about his experiments (that's what he liked to call them, like a scientist), not that they would have reason to do so. Three weeks and the cuts deepened, the pills increased in piles, and he was drowning more from the alcohol than from actual water, but it still wasn't enough. He was still healing rapidly each time. Never like a normal human being.

* * *

On a trip to Tony's home in Florida to help him clean up more of the Mandarin mess, Steve left them for a bit to spend some time on his own. He walked along the beach and waited for the sun to drop and when it did it started to look more orange and purple than he had ever seen it before. He watched it set as he waited for people around him to disappear.

Steve wondered what it would be like to fly into the sun like that one story he read in the book of poetry. Would that kill him? It would kill a normal human being.

* * *

That first night in Florida he went into the dark water and held his breath for five whole minutes without any clothes or items holding him down. That wasn't right. His lungs should have started screaming in pain and anguish in less than 30 seconds like when he was younger. Normal, he needed that normalcy.

When the team asked he told them he went for a swim, because it wasn't a lie. The second night he went in with all his clothes on, with the heaviest items he could find.

Some rocks too.

This time the digital water-proof watch Tony had given him read only three full minutes before his lungs finally felt like they were going to explode and Steve was sure they did. They burned even as he managed to break through the waves, carry those heavy objects with him, but he hadn't expected the weight to accumulate with the water so quickly and he was being suffocated all over again.

He found his limits. Fully clothed with rocks for almost four minutes.

Steve didn't think he would die that day, but he knew he cut it close when he blacked out in the water and woke up on the sand right by the shore, the suddenly biting wind startling him into consciousness. He hadn't even seen Clint at the edge of the water, hadn't even seen Clint then jumping into the water, because he had been too busy struggling, but now Clint was panting hard, sitting up and alert on his knees, watching Steve in terror.

"Are you okay?"

He didn't know how it had gotten so dark and he had never seen the moon this big before. And the usually stoic and calm and sometimes haunted look in Clint's eyes was now a fear and confusion Steve had _also_ never seen before.

"Rogers what was that?" He panted out, brushing nervous fingers through his own soaked hair. "What the hell was that? Are you okay?"

"I'm fine."

"Are there _rocks_ in your pockets?"

The implication was clear and Steve remembered being rushed to the hospital by his mother after he tried to slice his arms open. Clint couldn't possibly think it was even remotely the same thing though, none of them could. He had been in a completely different mindset then, this was _not_ the same.

"No-no it's not like that."

"I can get Stark or Banner to look at you—"

"_No_!" Steve coughed and his throat ached from the salt water that had managed to get into those indestructible lungs of his.

Maybe it hadn't technically fully been three minutes after all. He _had_ blacked out for some time. Maybe through the shock and fear he saw in Clint's eyes it still meant he should try this again. Be normal. Maybe. Definitely.

"I'm fine, I'm fine." Steve took a deep breath and steadied Clint with a serious and honest look. And then he told him what he had been telling himself. "Those Atlanteans, those underwater creatures, they just made me wonder, that's all."

"What's that supposed to mean? Wonder _what_?"

"Wonder how I would do in any sort of fight against them, how I'd survive. You're right, you were right before. Not even a scratch on me."

Steve didn't hear the anger and disgust in his own voice. It was something he was used to, it was something he had to fix in himself and eventually he was sure out on the beach that he had convinced Clint that it really was nothing to worry about.

Because it _was_ nothing to worry about.

* * *

"_Any object, wholly or partially immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object."_

* * *

Steve didn't hear it in his voice, but Clint sure as hell did.

When they all got back to the tower in New York (well not all of them) Clint found Bruce working privately in his lab.

The glasses were on and he was immersed in his work, but Bruce let him in with a friendly surprised grin. It wasn't a secret that Clint hadn't interacted with most of them individually since he moved in, only Natasha, and right now his expression remained as unreadable as usual, but both of them knew it was a welcome surprise.

"Where's Stark?"

"I told him to take a break. Spend some time with Pepper. You need him?"

"What about Rogers?" He paused, correcting himself. "Steve. Do you know where Steve is right now?"

"In Brooklyn as usual."

"Do you know what he's doing when he's not training?"

Bruce finally looked up from his work with raised eyebrows, staring at Clint curiously.

"Do _you_?"

"I might have a theory." Clint didn't elaborate, observing the room and the equipment around him briefly before turning his attention seriously back to Bruce. "We should go down to his apartment now, see if he wants to get a coffee or something."

Bruce smiled, ready to laugh, but then paused when he noticed the silent worry, the silent plea being conveyed.

Steve didn't answer his phone the two times they called, but they remembered the address he left in case he was needed or invited to impromptu events Tony hosted (which were numerous but apparently not as numerous as they used to be). When Clint told him not to tell anybody else about a simple coffee run Bruce finally felt worry creep in. He swallowed it down as they made their trip to Brooklyn.

* * *

Steve found the gleaming silver cinderblocks as part of a big pile by a construction site and the three large ones he took weighed like nothing in his bag, which gave him more incentive to continue what he was doing.

He missed the phone calls and it almost felt like somebody else was controlling him as he filled the tub in his small bathroom with lukewarm water and splashed right in without taking his clothes off. He'd call whoever it was back later.

Would he?

There was no ocean here. He was in control now.

He could feel that the first cement block finally had a considerable amount of weight under the water as he held it, so Steve decided to fast forward the process and use the other two as well. All three on his chest, keeping him down like a magnet in the rusty tub. He thought about the creatures that could hurt him that would be able to breathe just fine right now, he thought about his mother and Peggy and Bucky and he blinked very slowly, submerged with his clothes and more rocks in his pockets and the minutes slowly ticking away.

His eyes were stinging and so was his skin. The blocks were making it harder and harder to breathe. Thirty seconds, one minute, two. His vision was blurring, his lungs were finally screaming.

Three minutes in he realized he was actually going to die. He could barely move and then a voice in his head said that it was okay. He was okay with it. This way he really was vulnerable and human again. They would all be so proud of him.

Steve watched two figures that appeared in his luminescent bathroom, he watched them for a bit in the swirling water and he thought he was in heaven, because the light danced around them like angels. He closed his eyes and remembered the time the lifeguard forgot about him at the community pool when he was a kid, the figures slowly approaching him.

But the figures weren't actually slow in fact, because Clint and Bruce bolted into the washroom the second they saw the slightly ajar front door (that wasn't like Steve to leave his home unlocked), the lack of any response when they called out to him. The two of them barely registered the water as they helped one another with the cinderblocks and promptly forced Steve out of the tub, out of the water.

He had blacked out _again_ (progress!) and Clint had to perform CPR for the longest 30 seconds of any of their lives. Steve just coughed awake again and stared at their first relieved and then terrified looks. The light and crisp delicious air hit him like… well like the hammer of Thor. Right into his grateful lungs.

But after he had composed himself, lying on the cracked blue-tiled bathroom floor, Steve became acutely aware of who he was surrounded by. This wasn't what it looked like, this wasn't what they thought. But their _eyes_, their critical eyes shouldn't have made him want to look away and crawl right back into that water, but they were doing just that to him.

He took in sharp painful breaths and actually winced (progress) and then he noticed his skin stinging and pricking (progress) up against clothes that were clinging to him like glue and irritating him, making him want to scratch a possible rash that had formed because of the cinder blocks.

Progress.

"Look… I can explain."

"Yeah?" Clint let out a breathless, almost hysterical laugh and it was like they were on the beach again.

Bruce watched them both calmly, emotions quickly in check, trying to calm his breathing, before he eventually looked away to pull off his glasses and clean them, immersed in his own thoughts.

"There's something wrong with me."

"No. There isn't." Bruce replied, matter-of-fact and brisk, not even looking up from his glasses. At least they weren't broken.

"There is." Steve wanted them to look him in the eye, but also wanted them to continue to ignore his gaze because he was an abomination, a science experiment. "I'm not human." At their even more confused expressions he continued quickly. "I mean you… you guys are trained and skilled in certain things, but you can still get _hurt_. There are consequences when a bullet hits you or-or-or…" He looked up at Clint. "An alien tries to control you."

Clint sobered up and exchanged a heated glance with Bruce, who returned it critically.

"You guys go through so much. You deserved to be on a team where _everybody_ understood the consequences." Steve couldn't help laughing then, tried to play it off. He was a hero, they would understand now. "So I was just testing what I could handle. See, I'm okay. I'm fine—"

"No." Bruce pocketed his wet glasses and leaned forward, suddenly meeting Steve with an honest ferocious gaze. "You most certainly are not."

"We're a team." Clint agreed, his own ghostly blue eyes surprisingly soft and… understanding. "Like you said. And we're gonna help you."

* * *

Through Clint, Natasha was of course the next to find out once the schedule of Steve's experiments was fleshed out more. He was embarrassed and he tried to change the subject as they prodded him further, asking him everything he had done, and Bruce and Clint eventually found out, with Natasha then mutely appearing at his apartment. She took away all of his knives, pills, alcohol, and disappeared as quickly as she had appeared, to take the stuff to God knows where. They briefly nodded towards each other, but all she did was ask where everything was and somehow with Natasha he couldn't help telling her.

The next day, before Steve could think up a way to beat himself up over it, before he could wonder why they even saw it as a bad thing, Bruce and only Bruce appeared next at his door.

"Let's get a coffee in Central Park."

They took a long bus ride and walk to the park and Steve felt lingering doubt all through the trip. He knew he was about to get a lecture or a suggestion to go to a mental institution. Seeing the kids near them running around, with one of them in a Captain America costume as they passed the Bow Bridge, it suddenly hit him.

What would they think if they had known about Steve's last two months, about his experiments? How would the _press_ react if he had accidentally it slipped up and _permanently_ hurt himself?

He really screwed up. And he did it for so long.

He thought about his mother and Peggy and Bucky and how if they were here right now they would be so disappointed.

Sitting on a bench with the shadows of maple trees looming over them, Steve put his head in his hands and sighed. Bruce let him, taking his turn to watch the people, relaxing to the slight breeze and chatter around them. Steve tried to calm his nerves, but he still wouldn't look up.

"Okay, just say it."

"Say what?" Bruce sounded uncharacteristically lighthearted.

"I didn't know what I was doing." Steve rubbed his forehead, hunched over. "I just… I just wanted to feel normal."

He remembered the moments when he was young and he had hurt himself and he had been rushed to the hospital. He remembered his mother's worried face and wondered how this happened again. She would be so ashamed. A few pills, a few drinks, a few cuts, it was never enough. Why had he felt the need to prove himself like this?

No wonder his new family was worried too. At least he had a family again. That was something.

"Remember when I told you guys about the time I tried to kill myself? Shot a bullet in my mouth, but the…" He cleared his throat. "Hulk wouldn't let me. I mean Loki's scepter was influencing us that time, but I wasn't lying. You guys didn't pity me and none of us are pitying you now."

Steve sat up and decided then and there to act like a man and take what Bruce was saying seriously. Because he was right, he remembered always treating Bruce like a normal human being with one giant difference about him. He should have realized that even through the jokes and teasing and sometimes jealous looks, it was the same with Steve.

He screwed this up for so long. Mirroring things he did in the 1940s and 1930s that he never thought would come back to him.

"But we're _still_ here for you."

* * *

At the end of another mission, one that had involved an old HYDRA agent that had popped up after all these years to wreak havoc in Poland of all places, the team was glad they kept the citizens safe and handled the problem with much milder consequences than before. (And now they knew HYDRA agents were still around, so that was a bonus when it came to being one step ahead of the bad guys.)

As usual there were still injuries. Tony would fix the fresh painful-looking scratches on his suit once they reached the jet, and the rest of them flexed their shoulders and grimaced at being pushed to their limits and of course Steve noticed it. Of course he noticed their bruises and cuts and scratches. The way they limped and winced with each new step.

Steve felt the familiar anxiety. His heart jumped into his throat and his skin started to have that itch it had when he had the urge to cut himself. He took a deep breath and snapped out of it when he felt a firm hand on his shoulder. Clint had a cut on his forehead with blood flowing into his eye, but he also had a small friendly grin like it was nothing. It was some picture.

"You comin' to the infirmary with us?"

Steve paused and stared around at the destroyed building and empty street, the dust settling. All-in-all it didn't look so bad.

"Maybe when you guys heal you can help me move my stuff to the tower."

"Sounds like a plan."

* * *

_He agitates his arms,  
__but without wings, they cannot grip the air,  
__and with his father's name on them, his lips  
__are taken under by the deep blue sea  
__that bears his name, even to the present._

* * *

**Author's Note:** The poems are from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book VIII, the story of Daedalus and Icarus. And the one quote in the middle is from Archimedes' Principle.


End file.
